Data Analysis Fundamentals: Step 4: Analyse Engine Health
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Step 4: Analyse Engine Health
08.10
| 00:00 | - So the car's returned to the pit lane, we've already gone through and downloaded the data. |
| 00:03 | The first thing to go through and check is that we've got no reliability issues coming in. |
| 00:07 | As we discussed in the course, if we have got anything that's going to affect our reliability or the car staying reliable on track, that's much more important for us to sort out before we get to the point of trying to improve our driver performance, we want to make sure that everything is going to keep working as we intended. |
| 00:22 | I'd just like to start by giving a little bit of an introduction to the software that we're going to use to look at the data today. |
| 00:27 | That is our AiM Race Studio 2 analysis which is the current release version of the software that we use to analyse all of the data. |
| 00:34 | So if we just jump across on my laptop screen here. |
| 00:37 | There's a couple of different things I'd like to draw your attention to. |
| 00:40 | We've got a common file structure up here like you'd expect from most Windows PCs. |
| 00:45 | But the vast majority of the things we're going to come into contact with are the measures tab, the laps tab, the different user profiles and of course the analysis section as well. |
| 00:55 | So as I said earlier in the worked example, the way AiM organises their logged data is into a common database so you can see all of the data that you've got available on your own computer. |
| 01:04 | So by default here I've got all the data that's available on my computer. |
| 01:07 | We have got the ability to filter by certain criteria. |
| 01:10 | So let's say I just wanted to show all of the, sorry if I come and select driver, if I want to show only Andre Simon here it will filter everything out by that particular driver and again I can go through there and undo that filter. |
| 01:25 | So you can see I can do that by championship, by test type, by vehicle, by track, whatever it is you're interested in looking at. |
| 01:31 | To go through and open any test of interest, all you need to do is highlight it on here and you can multiple select by holding the control key. |
| 01:38 | All you need to do is select it and press open test and that'll open. |
| 01:41 | Now in this case, I've actually already got the ones I want to look at open so I've got this 1:49.496 open and I've got this 1:53.046 which are the fast laps with the car in the same setup by the two different drivers I want to look at. |
| 01:56 | And you can see that they're open here because I've got in the measures tab in the top left here we've got the two laps currently selected which is lap 5 and lap 6 in these two runs. |
| 02:06 | So I've got two different data log files open here. |
| 02:09 | One of the ways we can tab between them is by these tabs at the bottom. |
| 02:12 | You can actually press control spacebar will hide or show that display. |
| 02:17 | So this is just essentially just a summary of all of the laps you've got available. |
| 02:20 | This is one of the places that you can come and select different laps you want to look at. |
| 02:24 | So if I wanted to look at lap 5 or wanted to look at lap 4 as well, I can come through and click those and you'll see these laps will be added to in my measures list. |
| 02:32 | So each one of these sections is defined by the log file and then this is showing the laps that are available to be shown in that log file or the laps that are selected to be shown in that log file. |
| 02:43 | I don't want to look at lap 4 or lap 5 so I'm going to unselect those here but that's the idea behind clicking between these tabs. |
| 02:48 | In the measures list we've also got the option to colour the information by the channel colour or by the log file colour and we can see the log file colour here is defined, if we click on it we can come through and update that and choose any log file colour we want. |
| 03:02 | Another place we can modify which laps we want to look at is in this laps column here. |
| 03:06 | So I can come through and select laps manually that I want to show in there. |
| 03:10 | This last tab here, user profiles, the idea here is that you can have different profiles which is collections of displays saved, so you can, the idea is that you can quickly change between different display layouts depending on which type of analysis you want to do. |
| 03:23 | So at the moment I've got one here for reliability which I've got loaded and this is giving us a summary table, a report table for some of our critical engine parameters. |
| 03:33 | And we've also got the option to display some of these on a time/distance plot if you want to dig into those any further as well. |
| 03:40 | So you see here, I've got the option to colour things per lap or by channel. |
| 03:45 | So in this particular situation, I want to look at things coloured by the log file because this shows to me very clearly which pieces of data is coming from which log file when I'm doing this overlay. |
| 03:56 | So you can see at the top here I've got these two different tabs and each one of those tabs relates to the two data files that I've got open and you can see each one of those has a different report associated with it. |
| 04:05 | So this is the latest log file that I want to look at to do the comparison and we see we've got 8 laps in this log file and it's given me a summary of each one of these parameters that I want to check. |
| 04:17 | So in this case we've got engine coolant temperature, engine oil temperature, inlet air temperature, engine oil pressure, we've got summary of the maximum front brake pressure, the maximum boost pressure that you had as well as the average ECU throttle position and the minimum battery voltage for any of those laps. |
| 04:34 | So you can see how I've got each one of these configured, I can just come into the add/remove and I can come down, look at any of the channels we've got logged for this car and if I want to go through and select, for example if I wanted to look at the maximum in line acceleration, I can select that here, I can add that across, press OK and that will be shown as a channel in here. |
| 04:57 | So if we come through those reliability channels, if we have a look through the maximum engine coolant temperature, if I just scan down through this list here, I'm pretty happy with most of these until we get towards the end of the run and we've got up to 114°C here. |
| 05:08 | So on this particular day we did have a problem with the car that meant we got it overheating at the end of that run and that's what we're seeing picked up right there, so that's a really important thing to keep control of obviously. |
| 05:20 | We've got the engine oil temperature, similar thing, we've got the sort of trend, as the run goes on, we're starting relatively low here but as we get to the end we get to our maximum values. |
| 05:30 | Now the engine oil temperatures aren't something I'm worried about but seeing that trend is important. |
| 05:37 | Engine air inlet temperature, just scanning down here, everything looks pretty sensible. |
| 05:40 | We do see some sort of relationship between the engine coolant temperature and the inlet temperature as it tends to rise as we get really hot towards the end there. |
| 05:49 | The engine oil pressure, scanning down here, we've got these minimums. |
| 05:53 | So this is getting quite low in lap one but what will be going on here is that's when the car starts up for the first time or potentially before the engine's running at all so that's not a problem but if we do want to check that, that's what we should be using the time/distance plot down here for that we can go look at. |
| 06:13 | We've got the maximum front brake pressure which in this case isn't actually a reliability issue but if it's something down here, you might want to be doing comparisons of which laps using the maximum brake pressure, I just chucked that there as an example of not necessarily looking at a reliability perspective. |
| 06:31 | We've got our maximum boost pressure, so if we had any over boosts, we would pick that up here really quickly without having to go through the time/distance plot and I've also got our average throttle position shown over on a per lap basis there. |
| 06:43 | As we see the faster lap times, both of these 1:53s, they line up pretty well with having the highest average throttle position which is generally what you'll see, the fastest laps have the highest average throttle position and we can also see our minimum battery voltage there as well. |
| 06:59 | So if we wanted, for an example we see a really low battery voltage at the start of this run, for lap one. |
| 07:05 | So if we were to come back here and select that one which is obviously when the car's sitting in the pit lane, we can come back here and we can see, when we had this really low battery voltage, we've got this shown in green here, I can see the green battery voltage line, if I come back here I can actually see when we've got zero speed in the pit lane so I can be sure that that's when we've had that low voltage, that's not anything, it's not something really we need to worry about, that's just something that's happened in the pit lane. |
| 07:32 | So that's it for a quick scan over the main reliability channels and a few extras as I went through there for you guys as well. |
| 07:37 | But that's the sort of level of detail you should be going through when you're checking your reliability channels. |
| 07:43 | You can see how important it is to have these things pre configured before you get to the track so as soon as you download the data you can run straight through the reliability channels without having to really go through and set up anything for yourself. |
| 07:53 | The idea is we're just scanning through to quickly see if there's anything wrong and if we do see something weird in that report table, we can jump across maybe to a time/distance plot or some other plot depending on what you're looking at to see if we have to dig deeper into the problem or if it's something we don't need to worry about at all. |
